If You Lead, I Will Follow
For All Nails #41: If You Lead, I Will Follow by M. G. Alderman ---- :And when that I have murdered :The man in the moon to a powder :His staff I'll break and his dog I'll shake :And there'll howl no demon louder. :Refrain: Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys :Bedlam boys are bonnie, :For they all go bare and they live by the air :And they want no drink nor money --Traditional, "Boys of Bedlam" :Star's Hollow Township, Connecticut, Northern Confederation, CNA :22 November 1962 A wet, leaden winter morning had settled over the town square, spiny-branched trees rising over the common, their swaying capillary-branches crucified against the pale sky filled with a flock of black-silhouetted crows, cawing mournfully. The lanky-legged schoolgirl counted almost sixty of them clustered sinisterly in the blasted choirs of the ruinous trees they called home, shaking off their morbid presence with a laugh as she dashed to the other end of the deserted square. She'd checked her watch, and you could set your clock by Jean-Paul's schedule. Sure enough, the stuffy Quebecker who ran the Inn was crossing the street, walking past the porticoed façade of the town hall. The skinny girl was tall for her age, with long awkward pubescent limbs that gave her motions an odd coltish clumsiness and made her plaid school uniform jumper seem ridiculously mis-sized for her. She wasn't the best looking of her friends, though she had the sort of physiognomy that suggested those who berated her for her plain features would, in good time, be quite jealous of her late-blooming looks. But whatever the case, such thought were far from her mind as she scooped up a spheroid of snow in mittened hands, shaping it into a perfect missile, taking aim for Jean-Paul's immaculately brushed high hat. She had just cocked her arm up as a shiny black locomobile with Confederation government plates roared across the intersection, Jean-Paul jumping back madly onto the pavement, shaking his fist in the air as it sped past. It screeched to a halt right before the schoolgirl. A man in a well-tailored black suit slipped out of the driver's side and dashed onto the pavement, his sturdy face betraying relief. He bent down towards her, out of breath, exclaiming, "Your father wants you to come with us, Miss Gilmore." Ev was unsure what to make of the strange man in the black suit. Nobody'd ever called her "Miss" before. But he seemed so relieved, so frantic, so hurried. "My mother told me never to speak with str--" "No time, Miss! No time! You're in danger," he said, grabbing her by one hand and opening the rear door. She stepped in, hesitantly with a backward glance. Danger! An adventure, perhaps? In her younger days, she had been simpler, lacking the suspicion that pursued her every move nowadays. She had seldom resisted orders from her parents, never questioned, and excepting some slight hidden rambunctiousness like lobbing snowballs at elderly Quebecois men, was otherwise a very well-mannered child. Perhaps it was better then. Perhaps it wasn’t. Trust can be dangerous. The loke roared through the streets disregarding any and all posted ordinances concerning speed and direction. The man was at the wheel, with a young, pretty woman dressed in equally severe black at his side, seated shotgun. "I told you not to tell me that," he snapped at her. He turned around to face the girl and smiled, a little forcedly. "I am Mr. Adams and this is Miss Feldon. We're taking you home, Miss. We apologize for any inconvenience." "Can I see my father when I get home?" Adams looked at Feldon, his mouth open but soundless, looking as if he did not know what to say. Feldon managed to force out an answer. "Y-yes ... maybe--we'll see, dearie, won't we, Donald?" "Yes," he said, gravely. "Sorry about that, Miss Feldon." ---- General the Hon. Horace, Lord Gilmore, was dead. There was no disputing that, thought Colonel Hogan, with sick precision as he looked down at the corpse lying in the pool of blood at his feet--that had once been his superior. The closest thing he had to a father since pop's death. He'd seen death before, but those were anonymous deaths, like a butchered chicken in barnyard. Not in combat, but an intelligence officer sees things. It was callous to say such things, but it was the only thing that allowed him to keep on as a soldier without losing his mind. And there were times, boozy evenings in Luke's bar in the Henry IX Arms across the square from the Town Hall, where he felt that his mind was on the verge of being unhinged. He had seen too much. And so had the General, when he was younger, before the Staff had rescued him from the idle world of the barracks and placed him behind a desk in Military Intelligence, where unspeakable things were done only in far away countries behind closed doors, even in the name of free nations like the C.N.A. There was nothing on his face that suggested pain, though he seemed to have had aged a score of years: he had always seemed so vigorous for a man of his age. He tried to focus on the way he had been last night ... for sense, for clues, for anything -- The Mexicans? It was possible... Michigan City -- my God, the d-mned greaser Yanks, of course FN1. Or even the Kramer clan, for that matter. No -- he was thinking irrationally. The great lobed spectre of Taichung, the searing image of the mushroom cloud that had loomed in the contaminated air over the north Pacific that August, still haunted him; it haunted everyone who had glimpsed it on the vitavision news. Like staring into the mouth of hell, pure undistilled evil. Salazar ... what a madman ... Didn't mean that the Kramer men were behind this butchery ... We didn't have the bomb, and Mason doesn't want one-- The Michigan City file. Something was going on up there; he had to retrieve it before the constable arrived--take all of his files, burn them, hide them, bury them in a lead box, anything but risk exposure. And it didn't matter what the Mexicans wanted in Michigan City--they may have just been laying the groundwork for something bigger, something to spring into action when things got interesting. After all, Perry Jay had been making noise about a C.N.A. bomb -- imprudent of him; got the Mexicans interested. The old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. Blast it. He went to go open the General's safe. Then he would slip out before the constable came. Maybe Burgoyne was a safe place for him to go. But he had to disappear for now. He sidestepped the body and headed over to the wall, reaching for the ornate baroque picture frame that hid the wall safe. Suddenly, he heard a door creak open behind him. He stiffened beneath his khaki uniform. "Robert?" Hogan turned slowly on his heel. Lady Gilmore. He spun around, snapping a shallow breath, trying to compose himself. He felt his hands fumbling idly with the frame, trying to swing it closed. He was never quite sure how much Lady Gilmore knew about her husband's post-retirement "consultation job" with Intelligence. She knew he did something for the boys in Burgoyne, but he gathered that she had taken Lord Gilmore’s current position to be analogous to being kicked upstairs, to use the colorful idiom. He had no intentions of changing her mind in regard to that. "Ma'am," he exclaimed, trying to mask his surprise. "Oh my God," she muttered quietly, looking at the body. "Oh my God ..." Hogan had always thought Anne, Lady Gilmore, quite a handsome woman, looking somewhat younger than her forty-odd years. She had seemed even younger next to her rather old husband. She had always been a fashion plate, sporting the latest trends from New York or Buenos Aires, giving her trim figure and elegant carriage a youthful springiness. However, the stylish, vaguely geometric gamine that her shiny auburn locks had been shaped into seemed incongruous with the pitiful face beneath. She looked like she had aged a decade in the last hour, tears biting acidly into her face, smooth skin cropping into wrinkles that had never been there, her eyes wild with horror and loss. She collapsed into a chair, and began to weep, sobs muffled by her gloved hands. Hogan stood there, at once filled with horror and pity. An electric uneasiness shot through his frame, leaving him drained of energy. He moved towards Lady Gilmore, his hands shaking, and managed a cautious pat on her shoulder. "There, there," he murmured. Lady G. could be a tiger when her anger was aroused. It was so—downright terrible to see such a magnificent creature reduced to an overdressed, makeup-smeared aged stranger. Somehow her ageless beauty seemed a joke, a sham. She was just a skinny middle-aged woman crying in a blood-stained study with a pathetic clown of an adjutant, thought Hogan. He should be able to deal with these situations, darn it, he was a member of the Confederation army, the steel-tipped wall that had kept North America safe, peaceful and free for more than a century FN2. He heard the butler ushering someone into the hallway. For a moment, he was frozen with fear but then sprinted for the door. Too late. ---- Adams and Feldon, holding the lanky Evie Gilmore's hands, led her into the marble-floored front hall, the tailcoated butler leading the way. Overhead, the girl heard stormy mutterings. Snippets of talk between the two government agents. "Where do we take her?" "Do something, Donald. We can't keep making it up as we go along." "Don't tell me that we can't do that. What do you think the Chief and I have been doing for the last ten years?" "Oh, Don, you simply can't keep winging it." "I told you not to tell me that," he muttered through clenched teeth. Evie Gilmore suddenly jerked free from them, making a dash towards the half-open double doors of her father's study. The doors slammed shut, but not before she could see something that would shatter her world forever. Like a scene in a carnival waxwork house of horror, she glimpsed her father recumbent, sprawling in a sticky crimson sea of his own blood, his face turned up, invisible to her, as it stared, fish-eyed, at the plasterwork ceiling. "Dad? Dad?" The words turned from a humble question to a frantic scream. She pounded on the doors, her voice breaking into a single primal yell of fear, peaked and fell into a torrent of mumbled sobs, deathly quiet. She felt something die in her that day, something wither up, blackened, inside her chest. A dead weight, a stone hung where her heart was, and a leaden yoke was placed over her shoulders. All she could think of was blood -- the spilled blood of her father. And the blood of whoever had done this to her. They would pay, if it took her to the ends of the earth and the end of her life, but she knew that life had to pay with life and death with death. Beneath all her witticisms and posturing that she hid her cold-heartedness at the academy lay the primeval hot-headed fear that had been driving her since that cold grey day in New England. Someone would pay. ---- Forward to FAN #42: Fingernails that Shine Like Justice. Forward to 9 March 1963: Dominique. Return to For All Nails. Category:Ev and Alex Category:Historical